Climate Activist Protests In Europe Against Billionaires’ Luxury Travels

Climate activists are targeting private jets, superyachts, and golf camps in Europe as a part of global protests against luxury, reports the Associated Press.

Spanish climate activist group Futuro Vegetal –or Vegetable Future—was responsible for spray-painting a $300 million superyacht belonging to Walmart heir Nancy Walton Laurie. The group held a sign that read, “You consume, others suffer.”

Karen Killen, an Extinction Rebellion activist said that they are protesting because rich people are generating unnecessary emissions such as going to pick up pizza by boat.

“In a climate emergency, it’s an atrocity,” she said.

Also, in Spain another activist group plugged holes in golf courses to protest the heavy water needs of a golf camp.

Another 100 activists disrupted Europe’s biggest private jet sales fair in Switzerland by chaining themselves to the exhibition entrance and aircraft gangways. Also, in Germany the climate group known as Letzte Generation –or Last Generation—spray painted a private jet on the resort island of Sylt.

Some studies have found out that billionaires’ annual emissions are extreme in comparison to other people. Richard Wilk, an economic anthropologist at Indiana University said luxury travel is “the real culprit” in the emissions of rich people.

Greenpeace found that private aircraft in Europe alone last year produced the same amount of carbon pollution as the average annual carbon emission of over half a million EU residents.

Other academics think that centering the attention towards the rich may be harmful, as the fossil fuel companies alone are responsible for at least 70% of all emissions and that the solution is to achieve tighter regulations and to overall reduce the dependence that society has on fossil fuels.